US court: when your AI agent shops a site, that's you visiting, not the vendor
The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction against Perplexity's Comet browser on 4th Aug’26, holding that Perplexity's agentic assistant is a tool operated by users, not by Perplexity itself. Comet can log into a user's Amazon account with their stored credentials, browse on their behalf and complete checkout. The three-judge panel found Amazon unlikely to succeed on its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim, applied the rule of lenity to construe the statute's ambiguity against liability, and noted there is 'little to no existing case law' on how to ascribe responsibility for AI agents.
What it actually means
If an agent acts on a user's behalf on someone else's site, the court just said the user is the one 'accessing' it; permission and liability travel with them, not with you. That's a green light for user-directed agents, and a warning in the same breath: 'the user told it to' is now doing serious legal work, so build the consent flow and the credential handling like it matters. It also means the sites you point agents at can't reach for hacking law to shut you out. One ruling, one circuit, almost no precedent underneath it.
When your agent acts on your account, the court says that's you. So the consent and the credentials are now yours to get right.
Source: Courthouse News · Wednesday, 5 August 2026